I can only imagine how pleased my wife is now that she's found herself living with a Microsoft MVP awardee.  I told her "You may bring the MVP his glass of water now." While the MVP waits for his water, the MVP will complete his profile on https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=7AE15364... 

The MVP is growing quite parched.  I think the MVP will have to go get his own water.

I’ve been to the Microsoft campus a few times. I’ve gone for an authors and publishers briefing, MMIT training (during the week of 9/11 and decided to drive back home) and I was there earlier this year for a SharePoint conference, but this was the first time that I’ve ever been paid by Microsoft. I’d have to say that it was an outstanding experience!

I met Todd Baginski for the first time and as it turns out I had a lot of explaining to do. Todd asked me why I thought he’s full of crap. I was dumbfounded. I had no idea what he was talking about. He jogged my memory by referring to a blog post I made last month. Back peddling as deftly as I could I explained I felt the first post I read was aggressive and via my blog I was trying to communicate ...

The Greater Southeast District Information Worker Community (GSDIWC) is a member only site that I participated in and won a X-Box 360 among other things. What follows below is a note from Mike Gannotti the site administrator:

Greetings All,

I had hoped to have the monthly newsletter out by now to include the winner announcement but have been buried and won’t have a chance to do that until tomorrow. However, since quite a few of you have inquired on this I thought I would quickly send out a note before I hit this road this morning.

Without further ado…… (drum roll please) The winner of the Xbox 360 contest is……… Stacy Draper!

Congratulations Stacy. A brand new shiny Xbox 360 will be headed your way. It pays to participate at GSDIWC. I will be announcing a new contest with a new top prize shortly but for those who ...

I knew someone was going to do this I just didn't know how quickly.  It looks like Todd Baginski wins the BDC Application Race!  This guy is on fire! 

Also take a look at his Feature Manager Not to take anything away from his other posts.  By the way his posts are really more like articles, I get a lot out of them.  I remember the first post I read from this guy.  I thought he was full of crap, but he really did produce.

The world sorely needed this tool.  Keep up the great work!

Bob Fox has recently blogged about recruiters.  I'm not saying that recruiters aren't ignorant, but understand why they do the things they do.  You don't have to be good at putting a resume together to have great skills and to be desirable.  The recruiter is compensated to find a person with a certain skill set.  So they shake a lot of trees, so to speak.  They have to ask the questions, do you have this, this and this?  Over and over again until they find what they are looking for.  The reason is that person might have an outdated resume or may not have thought that those skills were important to list on their resume. 

Naturally a good recruiter or account manager will tell their client sooner rather than later that these skills are incongruent.  But sometimes they don't know, this makes them ignorant.  Ignorance is not so bad ...

Yesterday I completed SharePoint 123 course and then went to a bar-b-que.

In case you hadn't heard of it you can find it at http://www.sharepoint.com. The Atlanta Microsoft Professionals (http://www.atlantamspros.com/) who are Brendon Schwartz, Keith Rome, Matt Ranlett, and Dan Attis built course ware for SharePoint.  It can be done in 6 different sessions, there are 3 hours of lecture and 3 hours of Lab.  I say lecture but it's really demo.  The 300 course had only 15 slides in it for a 3 hour talk and I think half of those were slides that said DEMO.

Being an MCT in the past I know that it takes about three hours for every hour of presentation to prepare.  I went through everything and felt pretty confident about it.  Everything worked for me.  That's when I should have realized there was a problem.  Nothing worked in my presentation.  ...

I had a blast at the code camp, even though I burned through $1,100.  Well I brought my family too, so I wasn’t exactly the role model of an economy traveler, more like a mini vacation.  

Joe Healy asked me why I wanted to go all the way to Tallahassee.  Being all about telling the truth in an attractive manner I responded with, “So I can learn to be a better speaker.”  The fact of the matter is I just don’t want to do a bad presentation where people know me. But the audiences seemed to like it.  I had a couple of people ask me if I was available for work.  I had to ask myself, “They just saw the presentation and still want to work with me?”  So, I’m looking forward to giving these presentations locally.  Presenting locally could still be a problem though.
David McNamee, ...

Has anyone else noticed that there are a lot more women involved with SharePoint than say, asp.net?

Yesterday I went to help Duray Akar present SharePoint 123 level 100, he did such a great job I ended up just watching.  So it gave me a chance to ponder for a moment.  9 women out of the 21 attendees.  I'm sure I've never seen that kind of participation from the fairer sex at any IT event.  I noticed that at the dev connection the numbers ranged from a tenth to a third women in each session.  At other events I noticed the numbers were always around 5%.  I'm wondering if it's SharePoint or if it's because there are more women in the industry?

Is this a trend or an anomaly?

I don't mean to sound surprised, but when you set your goals just right, work really hard, quite often you can be fairly impressed with the results!

A couple of months ago I was at Dev connections in Orlando, and it seemed to do really well there - it sold best every day and finnally sold out.  Needless to say I was pretty happy!   The reviews on amazon are pretty good too, well except for one guy who obviously didn't read it and just looked at the pictures.  We didn't exactly set out to write a SharePoint pop-up book.  He points out something as being a mistake, it's not a mistake, it's actually what that chapter is all about.  Take a loot at these pictures while I take a deep breath. . . .

Paul Litwin has written a lot, like 12 books or something.  Curt Johnson at AWL ...

I just found a regional SharePoint site / special interest group http://gsdiwc.officeisp.net/.  I wish I can remember where I found it, I always like to give credit where it's due.   There are some pretty impressive members, both clients and consultants collaborating together and forging ahead.

I recently posted to tips and tricks and this is what I wrote.

Using RSS Feeds to Promote Adoption

Lack of Traffic

Ok! So, SharePoint has been deployed and people are using the sites. Or are they? Sometimes the corporate culture is such that people, for whatever reason, do use the portal. Perhaps it’s a lot of work to open a browser and just not worth the investment to get information about the place where they work, a place users feel they already know a lot about.

Often an attractive lure is information that is relevant to me, my job or my company that ...